InkStains January (9 page)

He didn’t used to feel pain.

He should have been dead. Old gods went away
and died, or were overthrown, vanquished, destroyed, obliterated.
Strengths faded with time. Immortality was a myth.

Yet he had survived so many thousands of
years, soldiering for a time, leading bandits, hiding amongst
Visigoths and barbarians and crusaders, but time proved unkind.

There were no other gods as old as he. Death,
in its mercy, took them all.

Now this last old god shivered and waited for
a mercy that refused to come.

He’d had his time. He’d wasted it. He never
understood the ways of Change, except in the forms of music. Music
always changed and grew. It was an area of expertise, of explicit
joy.

Definitely, in this tiny broken apartment,
enveloped by a living, breathing freeze, he heard sounds he had not
heard in thousands of years. It wasn’t much, three instruments only
– a string, a wind, and a drum – but they were, as far as he was
concerned, the original instruments, and they played the very first
song.

Long ago, he had heard this song in temples
and shrines and palaces. He had danced with mortals and goddesses
alike, drinking wine and gorging themselves on the flesh of their
lovers.

He opened his eyes. He’d been drifting, near
to sleep, lulled by so impossible and familiar a song. It did not
come from inside his head.

He roused himself, no easy task. He shed the
blanket. His skin crackled. The blood in his veins, with
reluctance, began to move.

It didn’t come from outside, but
upstairs.

He left his apartment, climbed the stairs out
of the basement, through the ground floor and up two more flights,
following the sound to a door that stood slightly ajar. Inside,
there was music but also laughter, conversation, the smells of
roasting meats and cheese and drink.

He was an old man now, he moved slowly and
deliberately, but he had always been a god, and that’s how he
entered the apartment.

The party goers looked at him. The music
stopped. All sounds ceased. There were ghosts among the kids –
everyone was but a child by comparison, but the ghosts were as old
as the god. They slipped between the children, the three musicians
and all the others, whispering unintelligibly in their dead
language.

“
What’s this?” he demanded,
in the way of gods.

“
A celebration,” one of the
ghosts said, though it used the voice of one of the modern
bodies.

But the god could see the bodies of today
were in a state of fear.

“
Who are you?” the god
asked.

“
Your ghosts.”

“
I’ve never dealt in ghosts
and spirits.”

“
Yet we have dealt in you.
Now dance and sing and drink and love while you can.”

The music started up again. The old god lost
himself in the rhythms and the ghosts and the memories. He knew he
was finally dying. It deserved a celebration. The ghosts slipped in
and out of the bodies, and his body, and the old god found himself
slipping between bodies himself. He tasted young flesh and renewed
passion and righteousness and naïveté and wonder and fear.

He had no gifts left to give – not to the
living and not to the dead – but he gave his last breath, and
still, in the bodies of the young, he danced until he had exhausted
them all.

Then, with his ghosts, he slipped quietly
away.

23 January

The map lies.

Kenny relied on the map to get him here, to
this little street that’s supposed to be here, but it’s not.

There’s not even an alley.

No, there are two buildings butted up against
each other, bricks of a similar texture and slightly different
shade.

He asks a passerby, “Do you know where to
find Stone Lane?”

“
Sorry, no, don’t know
it.”

He looks at the map again. There should be a
Stone Lane right here leading to a cul-de-sac. It wouldn’t be big
or wide or anything. It should hardly be noticeable. But it
shouldn’t be invisible.

The buildings are both apartments or offices
– the ground floor lobbies are painfully non-revealing, bland,
practically barren, each fronted by a glass door, a large vestibule
leading to an elevator shaft. Each has a single lift on the wall
opposite the wall that should border Stone Lane.

According to the folded city map in his
pocket, the road leads only to that cul-de-sac. It doesn’t continue
later, or cross the street. It should just be here.

He checks the map function on his phone. He
says, “It should be right here.”

“
What should?” a woman on
the street asks.

Kenny barely looks hat her. He’s staring at
the bricks. “Stone Lane.”

“
Ah,” she says, and she
begins to walk away.

“
Wait, wait,” Kenny says,
running after her. “What do you mean, Ah?”

“
What do you think I
mean?”

“
I think I must be slightly
wrong, and you could correct me.”

“
Are you asking me
something?” she asks.

“
Yes,” Kenny says. “Please.
Where can I find Stone Lane?”

She smiles. She’s pretty, though he wouldn’t
guess her age. She says, “On a map.”

He whips the map out of his pocket. It shows
Stone Lane right here. He points it out to her. He shows her the
image on his phone.

“
Well,” she says. “Two maps
say the same thing. They can’t be lying to you, can
they?”

“
What?” Kenny asks. He
blinks. “No, they can’t be lying to me.”

The woman shakes her head. “Perhaps your
faith is misplaced. Who was the mapmaker?”

“
I don’t know who made the
maps,” Kenny admits.

“
Well,” she says, looking
up from the map to stare at the wall. “I don’t see any Stone Lane
here.”

“
Neither do I,” Kenny says.
“Where is it?”

She frowns. “Haven’t I answered that
already?”

“
I’ve got to be close,”
Kenny says.

“
Oh.” She shrugs. “Well, if
you’ve got to be.” She’s still wearing the frown, but it’s false;
she’s having fun at his expense.

He stuffs the map back into his pocket. He
glances at his watch.

“
Have you an appointment?”
she asks.

“
I do.”

“
On Stone Lane?”

“
Yes.”

“
Are you late?”

Kenny shakes his head. “Not yet.”

“
Well, how much time have
you got?” the woman asks.

“
Maybe fifteen
minutes.”

“
Ah, a punctual type,” she
says. “Maybe you’re too early. Maybe it’s a magic road that only
appears at a specific time of day.”

“
Okay,” Kenny says.
“Thanks.” He turns away.

“
I’m just trying to be
helpful.”

“
I doubt very much it’s a
magic road,” Kenny says. A city bus stops near them, loudly,
discharging passengers and picking up others.

When it’s gone, the woman says, “That was my
bus.”

Kenny looks after it. “You missed it.”

“
I want to know if you find
your missing street.”

Kenny goes to the seam of bricks where the
two buildings meet. He touches the wall. It feels just like
brick.

“
Maybe it’s a trap street,”
the woman suggests. “They put those on maps to discourage dishonest
cartographers. Maybe there is no Stone Lane.”

“
I have an
appointment.”

“
Ah.”

Kenny glances at his watch again. “In twelve
minutes.”

“
So are you just going to
stand here as the time winds down and wait for your non-magical
street to suddenly appear?”

“
Do you have a better
idea?” Kenny asks. He’s being sarcastic and mean, quite
unnecessarily.

“
You could perhaps search
for it.”

It’s not an entirely stupid idea. She walks
with him around the block, turning right then right then right
again, but there are no other lanes or alleys or streets or roads
or paths leading into this tightly packed block of buildings.

“
That was useless,” Kenny
sighs – not a complaint about her suggestion but about the lost
five minutes.

“
Not entirely,” she says.
“You’ve determined, quite scientifically, it seems, that there’s no
entrance to Stone Lane on the outside.”

“
The outside?” Kenny
asks.

She shrugs.

Inside both buildings, through the glass
doors, he sees unadorned walls adjoining the missing street.

The glass doesn’t extend to that wall in
either building; he can’t be sure they’re back to back, that
there’s nothing between them. Could there be enough space for Stone
Lane?

Each of the glass doors is, however,
locked.

“
Well,” the woman says,
dangling her keys. “I happen to live right here.”

She unlocks one of the glass doors. They
enter the vestibule. There are no doors on that side, no hallways
except the one they’re in. There’s an elevator and a set of stairs,
behind a closed door, on the other side.

“
What floor are you on?”
Kenny asks.

“
I’m not inviting you to my
place,” she tells him. She returns the key to her purse.

Kenny tries the stairs. At the first landing,
there’s a hall. For whatever reason, the elevator doesn’t stop
here, but there are restrooms and a water fountain and conference
rooms on that wall. The inside wall, facing the next building, has
a few framed photographs and one window sill. There’s no window.
It’s been bricked up.

“
Maybe there is no more
Stone Lane,” the woman suggests. “Maybe they built over and through
it.”

Kenny glances at his watch. One minute to. “I
have an appointment.”

“
Maybe you’d better call
them.”

“
I can’t.”

“
No?”

Kenny shakes his head. “I don’t have a
number.”

“
You don’t have an
appointment,” the woman says. “Not one you’re going to get to, at
least.”

“
77 Stone Lane.”

“
Ah.”

“
There’s that Ah again,”
Kenny says.

“
You’re right,” she says.
“There it is.”

“
Maybe I can get at it from
the other building.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have a
key.”

They go back downstairs. As they pass the
elevator, its door slides open. No one comes out. Kenny
hesitates.

“
Go on,” the woman says.
“Seems like an invitation to me.”

She follows him into the elevator. He presses
the button for the Basement. When the door opens again, it’s onto a
poorly lit hallway. Here, the opposite wall has another bricked
over window – but also a doorway.

At first, it seems locked, but it’s merely
wedged tight. Kenny pushes into a tiny vestibule and out through
another door into a narrow alley, brick walls on three sides of
him, a plaque stating Stone Lane.

It’s narrow, and the bricks walls on all
sides are tall. They’re not unbroken, but every window seems to
have been closed up, some of the brickwork is chipped or faded, the
ghostly images of words – Bostonian Cigars, for instance – showing
what had once been written on the sides of these buildings. There
are doorways a little further in, and a cul-de-sac that’s actually
a courtyard, at the center of which grows a single, bare tree in a
tiny plot of dirt. The woman sits on a wrought iron bench next to
the tree.

“
Go on,” she says. “You’re
late.”

77 Stone Lane is a small green door with a
small, fading window, through which nothing is visible.

Kenny tells her, “I don’t know how long I’ll
be.”

“
That’s okay,” she says.
“If I don’t wait, you can find me at number 75 Stone
Lane.”

24 January

One day off per month.

25 January

She faces the mirror and, quite carefully,
applies her make-up – a touch of color here, a shadow there, hints
and suggestions. She’s brilliantly lit, perhaps harshly, by a
border of lights surrounding the mirror. It’s for the stage, for
the actress or chorus girl or showgirl or dancer. The light
highlights every possible weakness in her armor until there are
none. She works diligently to make sure of it. Though the lights
can be garish, the application never is. She’s an expert. Despite
the time she spends in the mirror, she creates neither a mask nor a
façade. She accentuates and de-accentuates. She draws out her
perfections, and her perfect imperfections. There’s no need to
hide. She’s a star, even if only in her own life.

She sits at a single table among many, a row
of round bulbs surrounding rectangular mirrors, but hers alone are
lit. The ceiling is high, the walls far off on every side, the
stage an even wider, higher, more open place than any mountain or
rooftop or city hall. The stage is huge enough to handle ballet or
opera or a cast of hundreds. There are five thousand empty seats,
on the ground, in the mezzanine, and in the balcony. The curtains
are thick and red, the wood dark and highly polished. A single
spotlight shines on the stage, lighting, as yet, nothing and no
one, waiting for the arrival of its star, its target, its hope. A
spotlight without a star is just a circle of light.

There are no ushers, no tickets being sold,
no one manning the concession stands. No one in the restroom will
offer a hand towel or a fresh mint or a spray of cologne. The hall
is dark. Outside, there are no posters, where once there had been
posters, no promises of shows to come, no threat that you might
miss something. The State Theatre’s majesty is cracked and faded,
and there’s a wrecking ball in its future.